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Oct. 15 Mike Matheny postgame interview

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Q. Can you give us your assessment of how Carpenter pitched tonight?

MIKE MATHENY: I thought he threw pretty well. A couple of things added up. The real hard hit balls ended up just stacking on top of each other. He's been real sharp lately. Today they just got a few things going, we couldn't get it stopped until there were too many runs on the board.

We have faith in him in these situations and know he'll come out next opportunity and make good pitches for us.

Q. On TV it did appear that guy was out. And Girardi two nights ago said this is why baseball needs instant replay. Do you have any comment on that?

MIKE MATHENY: I'm not going to take a hard stance one way or another on the replay. I know the League is doing what they can. I also understand speed of play. But we want the calls made right. I think we have some very good umpires in this League. But they're going to miss them. And part of my job when I see what I see is just to let them know and try to defend my guys.

But that really wasn't the game today. But every once in a while there's a big play that does change the course of the game and I'm not against having something else to help get it right. Our guys work hard to make the right plays and execute so we want things called fairly.

Q. What are your thoughts on Vogelsong, looked like you had him on the ropes, when Carpenter hits a double off of him to make the tying run, but shut it down after that?

MIKE MATHENY: Yeah, and that's not on the ropes. He set a good tempo and kept our guys off balance. He's done that to us a couple of times now. We haven't made the adjustments and he's executed his pitches well. But he's done a nice job, had a nice season. We're going to have to do something different if we see him again.

Q. Do you think Holliday's slide into Scutaro was a clean slide?

MIKE MATHENY: As I watched it live, I haven't seen a replay, but as I watched it live it looked like it was a hard slide. It didn't go out of the baseline to get him. Once again, I haven't looked at it again, but we teach our guys to go hard. Play the game clean, play it hard, not try and hurt anybody. And I hated to see that it ended up that way. That's not how we play the game. But we do go hard, but within the rules.

Q. In the game since the regular season started, your starters only got to the 6th inning one time. Do you have an explanation or analysis of that? And secondly, do you feel that's putting extra stress on the bullpen this time of year?

MIKE MATHENY: If I had an explanation we'd fix it and we wouldn't have been stuck in the 4th again. These guys have done a nice job for us, our starters have pitched deep into the game for us all season long. They've gone on some runs as good as any staff in baseball.

But you're going to have those times when you struggle a little bit and you need your bullpen to pick you up and need your offense to carry you. Offense did it for us yesterday. We couldn't get anything going today.

As far as taxing our bullpen, fortunately we were able to use ‑‑ we were able to use a young Shelby Miller and Rzepczynski to get us out of it and a few other guys, to give them a few days off with tomorrow and the off day. We're not concerned about how much we're using them. They've been very solid and they feel very good right now. Obviously we'd rather have our starters go deeper, that's the foundation for us having success.

Q. Can you talk a little bit about the matchup between these two teams. It seems like there are so many similarities, as far as having veterans and youngsters and deep bullpens. What it's like playing against these guys?

MIKE MATHENY: We didn't see them a lot this year, and have seen them enough, though, to respect what they have. And they have all the components of winning baseball. They've got solid starting pitching. They've got solid bullpen. They've got an offense that can be explosive and make the plays defensively. We respect the fact that they can hurt you in a number of ways.

With that being said, though, I'm always going to look at ourselves, too. And we've got a club that's very well rounded. So how I look at the series, I look at it it's going to be a hard‑played series all the way through. And it's just the team that executes the best is going to be able to be on top of this because the components are there.

Q. As a manager and somebody who's called a lot of good pitchers, what do you think makes Ryan Vogelsong so effective?

MIKE MATHENY: Kind of the things we've talked about today. He controlled the counts. He uses off‑speed well. Used secondary pitches for strikes. He's got good stuff. And when you have good stuff and you execute in the zone and you expand it when you want to, good things are going to happen for you.

But he just kept our guys off balance and that's the key to pitching. Hitting is timing and pitching is breaking up hitters' timing.